


Famous last words.

by owlvsdove



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Truth Serum, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-26
Updated: 2016-10-26
Packaged: 2018-08-27 02:06:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8383663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlvsdove/pseuds/owlvsdove
Summary: Jemma invents a truth serum. Grant thinks he can beat it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> here, have some consensual interrogation. 
> 
> very unbetaed.

 

“Ha!”

That noise usually isn’t good for him. 

Not that it isn’t cute. All of her mannerisms are spun sugar, never cloying but certainly giving him cavities. Weakening his teeth. 

“What?” Grant says, and then curses himself for asking. He doesn’t look up from his book, though. That he can manage. 

“I just finished my project. Ahead of schedule.” 

She sounds so smug. It takes everything in his power not to look up and find her smirk. 

“Good for you,” he says instead. 

“Aren’t you going to ask me what it is?”

“I’d rather not.”

He listens for Jemma’s huff of annoyance. “You should at least be a little bit curious, since it’s your turn on the trial rotation.”

The  _ trial rotation _ used to be when May and Ward took turns getting shot with ICER bullets to test their efficacy. He looks up now, suspicious. Her face is blank, though not without a trace of leftover smugness. 

“I’m not on your rotation.”

This is true, considering he was just welcomed (if that’s what you want to call it) back to SHIELD a few months ago, and no one’s mentioned it. 

“It’s compulsory.”

He gives her a look. “No, it’s not.” Her, of all people, trying to lie to  _ him _ , of all people. 

“Fine. If you don’t think you can withstand it, I’ll ask someone else.”

Finally, curiosity gets him. “What is it?”

She pauses, back to him now as she’d bluffed her way towards leaving the lab. She’s smiling, he’s sure of it. “Truth serum,” Jemma says sweetly. 

Bullshit. 

“Very funny.”

She spins on her heel. “I’m not joking.” He arches an eyebrow, so she continues. “We need a way to tell truth from fiction if we’re going to destroy HYDRA. This is the least unethical way I can think of to do that.”

“Drugging someone is your version of ethical?”

She pauses. “...It’s a gray area.”

“Simmons.”

“I just thought I would offer you the opportunity to try and beat it,” she says innocently. “But if you’re concerned about letting something slip, I’ll ask someone with fewer secrets.”

He sighs. “I know you’re trying to bait me into it.”

She says nothing, waiting.

He sighs again. “Fine. But I have two conditions.”

“Name them.”

“No Fitz, no lab rats. Just you in the room.”

“Fine,” she says. “And the second?”

“You can’t record it.”

This she frowns at. “Just video,” she counteroffers. “No sound.”

“Deal.”

They shake on it. 

 

 

 

Why did he say yes to this?

It’s not so much that he  _ can’t _ resist her. At least, he doesn’t think so. He just didn’t want to. 

Besides, Grant needs to know if he can beat this serum. Who knows how long he’ll be back at SHIELD before Coulson’s fragile trust turns sour; and if they get him in a cell again, there’s no way they won’t be using this drug on him, if it’s as effective as Simmons seems to believe. 

He knows she’s the smartest person he will ever meet - the most gifted mind SHIELD has ever known, before or after the uprising. Still, sodium pentathol, no matter what she does to it, is only murkily reliable at best. He has training for this. 

He’ll be fine. 

(Famous last words.)

 

 

 

“Can you feel it yet?”

It’s only been a few minutes, but she’s just leaned away from affixing his head, chest, and arms with sensors. 

“What’s it supposed to feel like?” 

“Not certain.” She frowns. “Maybe a bit like drunkenness.”

“Really?”

She shrugs. “Lowered inhibitions.”

“But that’s just a theory?”

She nods. Instead of taking the chair across from him she hops up to sit cross-legged on the table, peering over the table-top machine recording his biological responses. 

“You’re so small,” he says suddenly. And then his chin drops.

Jemma grins, checking her watch. “Six minutes. Not bad.”

“That’s not a secret,” he points out. “Just a fact.”

“Unprompted,” she shoots back. “Let’s establish a baseline. What’s your full name?”

“Grant Douglas Ward.”

“And your title?”

“Consultant.”

Jemma snorts at that. She knows how much he hates being referred to as something so expendable. 

“And who am I?” she asks. 

“Jemma Simmons,” he says. But it sounds wrong. Falls out of him like a sigh. 

That doesn’t bode well. 

“Now I’m going to ask you a series of questions I already know the answers to. I want you to specifically try to lie,” she instructs. 

“Okay.”

“How long after the Academy did you work as a specialist for SHIELD?”

“Six years,” he says immediately. Which is the correct answer. 

“Who was your supervising officer?”

“John...Garrett,” he grinds out.

She frowns. “Are you even trying to lie?” 

“ _ Yes _ ,” Grant hisses. And then he feels guilty, since she seems genuinely curious. 

“Hmm.” She makes a note on her clipboard. “In December of 2013 you were shot in the shoulder while in the field. Which shoulder was it?”

He pauses. “I don’t remember.”

Jemma gapes at him. He tries so hard not to smile. “You honestly don’t remember, or you’re lying?”

“I think it was the left?”

“Hold on,” she says , dramatically leaning over her clipboard again. “I just have to make a note here saying that you’re insane.”

“Cute,” is the response that leaves his mouth.

She looks up to give him a withering stare and moves on. “Who of your immediate family is still living?”

He sobers, a bit. Dangerous territory. “Just Thomas.”

This time she frowns. “What about your sister?” 

“I don’t have a sister. I just tell people I do to seem more sympathetic.”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “Wow.”

“Fuck,” he mutters. 

“That’s embarrassing.”

“Fuck you,” he spits.

Jemma doesn’t seem bothered. But then she drops another bomb: “Why did you betray us to HYDRA?”

The problem is she asks this so casually, and that actually throws him off enough to think through the drug before he speaks. “You don’t already know the answer to that question.” Huh. Avoiding the truth could mean the difference between life or death. That’s a win. 

“No, I suppose I don’t. I just wanted to see what you’d do.”

Yeah. That’s what terrified him about this in the first place. 

“I have a question,” he blurts. Grant only knows the words a second before he says them. “How much are you going to take advantage of me right now?”

Even to his own ears, he’s starting to sound nervous.

Her careful expression falls, and then she’s looking at him very seriously. Almost sad. He doesn’t want to see that. “I don’t know yet,” Jemma admits. “Do you think that makes me a bad person?”

“No,” he answers immediately. “I don’t think anything you’ve done makes you a bad person.” 

He watches her very closely as she swallows hard. She looks back at her clipboard to ask the next question but Grant’s mouth keeps moving. 

“Besides,” he says. “It’s a good tactical advantage. Coulson will be happy if you get something out of me.”

“I…” she starts. Shakes her head. “That’s not why I picked you. I wasn’t planning on telling Coulson anything. I was just teasing.”

“You should’ve been planning it,” he says, and he lets it be a criticism. “You’ve always been a little too trusting, even after all this shit. If  _ you _ can exploit me, you should. It’s the only way I’ll fall in line.”

As soon as he realizes what he’s admitted to, his hands grip the edge of the table, teeth gritted in a practice of control. Jemma blows right past the admission, perhaps not noticing his emphasis, and moves on to something worse. 

“Why do we have to  _ make  _ you fall in line?” 

She’s looking grave again. Shuttered closed. 

“You don’t,” he says desperately. He suddenly feels a rush of guilt. “But the easiest way to get me to behave is—” He struggles to clamp his mouth shut. A sweat breaks out on his brow when his teeth clatter together. 

He just has to keep his mouth shut long enough to think of a way to answer her truthfully without giving anything away. But he wants to tell her everything. All of it. So badly. It’s a consuming wave over his body, begging to be let free as it crashes against him.

“Are you planning to hurt us?”

“No,” his mouth springs open again. That one’s easy. 

Her eyes narrow. “Then why do I need a tactical advantage?”

“You’re too vulnerable!” he bursts. “You need to arm yourself. It needs to be second nature to look for weakness and exploit it. I don’t know how you’ve made it this long without self-preservation instincts but it makes me sick to—”

He cuts himself off again. 

He can’t look her in the eyes. He looks down at his lap and waits, trying to ride it out until she asks something else. 

“Why do you spend so much time in the lab?”

Shock at how irrelevant the question is almost lets the answer spring forward, but he takes several deep breaths, still not looking at her. “It’s easy to work in there,” he says. 

_ Finally _ . A half-truth. He swallows, sits back in his chair and looks up. 

She looks disappointed. 

“I just want to be near you,” he says on sight. 

Her eyes are wide and unmoving, trained on his face. It’s like the whole world freezes. 

Except for his mouth. “God  _ dammit _ .”

He lets his head slide onto the table, inches away from where Jemma is still perched, criss-crossed and quiet. 

After a moment he hears her shift, and suddenly his forehead is cradled on her shin, jeans soaking up his sweat. One cool hand finds the nape of his neck, fingers trailing. 

“Okay?”

God, she’s asking permission to touch him. He clenches his jaw so hard to keep from answering in delirium that he swears he can hear his bones crack. 

He nods dumbly. It’s a victory. 

She starts to rub the back of his neck gently, sliding up into his hair and back again. “I’m sorry. I won’t ask you anything else,” she says quietly. 

“I’m not angry with you,” he says helplessly. 

She lets out a big breath. Apparently that had been a legitimate fear of hers, despite his confession. 

“How long?” he asks. The sound is utterly miserable. But her hands are on him. No agenda other than to soothe what aches.  

“An hour. Maybe less,” she answers. “We can just...stay here.”

One of her hands leaves him and he hears a click that sounds suspiciously like the camera turning off. 

“Thanks for…” Grant fights himself. “Thanks,” he finishes lamely. 

His hands have snaked up to rest on her forearms, so he feels her shrug. 

“Thanks for volunteering,” she says lightly. 

Despite it all, he grins.

 


End file.
